North South Media have been doing an SEO league table over the past few months based on the rankings each company achieves within the search engines. As part of our on going SEO on our own site we have gradually moved up in the table and finally been ranked at No 1 for the UK results and No 2 for the International Results. While the league is not official or even that serious it is nice to be identified as one of the top SEO companies in the UK. Congratulations to Hobo Web and Just Searching for achieving No 1 in the Scottish and International results.

Regional results as follows:

UK National results as follows:

International results as follows:

So there has been a lot of mention about linkbait over the past few months. Some SEOs seem to treat it as the be all and end all when it comes to promoting a site. While I have no doubt it can be superb for a promoting a site by generating incoming links and, in my opinion more importantly, increasing a blogs subscription level it has also generated a huge spam issue.

There are plenty of linkbait techniques while most of them fall under a handful or methods including:

1. Tools – Examples include Business Opportunities Blog Worth with 1.5 Million links in Yahoo Site Explorer , or perhaps Digpagerank 12k Links.

2. Quizzes – Diggtest was Dugg 2843 times, though it does only have 766 links that’s not bad for one easy bit of linkbait.

3. Lists – Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should be Legal (5,520 Links, 2018 Diggs) The Ten Most Obnoxiously over-quoted movies (1,090 Links, 2592 Diggs)

4. Statistics/Research – Top 100 Digg Users (655 Diggs, 434 Links)

5. Controversy – George W “Atheists Neither Citizens nor Patriots” (4973 Diggs, 1,140 Links), or What Should You Do if You Find an Atheist? (3750 Diggs, 547 Links, for an image). I didn’t really know what to use for controversial so just searched for atheists as religion always causes a stir.

Problogger has a nice LIST of linkbait techniques to use if you want some other ideas.

I am sure there are some Elitist Digg members may say all linkbait is spam but while many/most of the above were designed as linkbait they were all original (as far as I know) and they were all fun or informative so therefore surely they are could not be spam.

Unfortunately with every good piece of good linkbait comes along dozens of pieces of spammy linkbait. We already know how to become a Digg power user in 48 hours, and DigitalPoint has several Digg services to help get you higher in Digg or even guarantee you getting to the front page of Digg.

This has led to posts like these:

1. Armoured cars: Essential kit for presidents. A word for word copy of the BBC News item with the same title that received 455 Diggs and has 412 links in Yahoo.
2. Stretch Limousine + San Francisco Hills = Disaster. Now this one is a bit more interesting as the website is for a Fort Lauderdale Limo Service, that blatantly linkbaited by creating a page of grounded limos. While that may of been unique or not they now seem to of removed that page and forwarded it to a page advertising a Miami Limo Service, I assume its 301′d to try and keep the influence of the old page. The old images are available here.
3. Btunnel - Free website blocker. Hat Tip to Blogstom. This one doesn’t even try and hide the fact it is spam!

So what ways are there to stop this spam? Digg bans the site or the users? So what we can create a new user and I if you get your site banned from Digg then there is always reddit etc.

The main concerns are what is Google etc going to do about it, after all isn’t that what linkbaiting all about? Blogstorm, SEOBook, and EMarketingPerformance have all posted about Google looking in to a sites natural link growth and discounting links that grow in spikes, therefore devaluing linkbaitng unless you keep launching successful linkbait one after another. As BlogStorm suggests the best possible technique to follow would be long term link bait such as “how to’s” which will gather links constantly over a long period of time.

Unfortunately if Google does go down the route of penalising sites that grow large numbers of links during a short period of time I imagine they will penalise many sites that have hit Digg/Reddit/etc naturally rather than on purpose, and possibly creating even more controversy than the recent PageRank update where many innocent sites had their PR dropped.

Ok it has been a long day and I am tired so I may be chatting rubbish, however I was just checking some stats for some clients when I did a search for the term liquidation. The number of results it returned was 3,280,000, I took a screen print of it incase I am actually spelling it wrong or something equally stupid.

Now I made a post on the 10 of October with some of the SEO Results we had recently achieved for some sites. At that time the search term Liquidation returned 29,100,000 results. Er so what happened to the other 25,820,000.

I am not going to do any more screen shots because I am too lazy but some quick comparisons of numbers that are showing for me now.

I presume this is just a glitch in Google’s information though a few my keywords have jumped from page 2 to page 1. Again I can not be bothered looking into detail if all my sites have been affected and I am sure everything will be back to normal by tomorrow!

As I am sure you are aware a large number of websites have seen a significant drop in PageRank including some big players such as:

• WashingtonPost.com
• Forbes.com
• Blog Herald
• ProBlogger.net
• CopyBlogger
• Engadget
• StatCounter
• SearchengineJournal

This drop also appears to of hit all the SEO companies on the NSM Top SEO Company League with every SEO company on the league either maintaining their current PR or suffering a drop. This has led some people to accuse Google of penalising SEO companies. In response Matt Cutts emailed Search Engine Journal to let them know that the “partial Google Toolbar PageRank” was a result of Google’s campaign against paid linking and advertisement links which influence PageRank.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

However many webmasters/bloggers have protested this penalty because they do not sell paid links. Some lucky Blogggers have managed to successfully request a reinstatement of PageRank from Google. Problogger was knocked from a PR6 to a PR4 and has now managed to have the PR5 reinstated.

If you have had a major hit in PR and you are 100% sure that your have not broken then Google Guidelines. Then it should be possible to log into Google Webmaster Tools, and to select “Request reconsideration” from the Dashboard on the right hand side.

However it is worth noting that by requesting a reconsideration you are telling Google you have violated their Guidelines in the past and to your best knowledge, are no longer violating them. Therefore if you go down this route you need to make sure you definately do not break the Guidelines anymore or you may end up worse off than you started.

Personally, while I am a little annoyed our PR did not go up, I am not that bothered. We have changed our site a lot since the last update along with promote it quite heavily. While we have not paid for any links I guess I can see how the Google algorithm may of penalised or blocked our site from any PR gain. The important thing to realise is that PR has no effect on rankings and we have maintained excellent rankings over the past few months.

Well it has finally come, the Google PageRank update is now underway. This has been the longest time between updates, which normally occur 4 times a year. However it appears there will only be 3 updates this year. The possible reason for this is due to the popular belief that PR represents very little in terms of quality of the page, and the fact that PR has generated a whole marketplace of webmasters selling links to pass PR juice. Unfortunatly Google has now decided to take a stance against sites using paid links, and sites that use paid links can be reported as spam. It is assumed that this stance against paid links means that Google will now be reducing the value of links it thinks are paid for and has led to many sites losing PR or not gaining any (for example our homepage stayed at PR4).

While it is nice to have a large PageRank in reality it provides nothing more than braging rights. It has no effect on the position of a site in the search engine results pages. For example Undetected is ranked in the top ten of Google for Satellite Navigation, and only has a PR of 3. Wikipedia, Halfords and Tesco all have a PR of 5 or 6 yet rank lower on the results pages for this term.

Other thing to note with PR is that the PR juice flows within a website much better then from seperate sites. For example our Homepage is PR4 and even though we have not built any links to our services page, the PR juice from the homepage etc has given it a PR4 also.

*Edit*

I forgot to mention that it seems that pages created before 30 September will of head Page Rank passed onto them(pressuming PR was due)

A follow on from yesterdays post it has been confirmed that Microsoft has invested $240 million investment in Facebook Inc. Microsoft said that it will be buying a 1.6% stake in Facebook Inc valuing it at $15 billion. Facebook is only 3 years old and the investment is based on potential rather than proven profits however the investment has secured Microsoft as the advertiser on the site until 2010 for both US and Abroad, and Facebook is expected to generate a revenue this year of $150 Million.

Last month Wall Street Journal reporting that Microsoft was apparantly trying to buy 5% of Facebook for $300 - $500 million. Today the NY Post is reporting that Google is trying beat Microsoft to the punch trying to bid for 5 - 10% of Facebook Inc. It is expected that the deal will be announced within the next 48 hours and Facebook’s investors are looking for a pre-money valuation of $10 billion-$15 billion in any deal. On the high side, that means Microsoft or Google would have to come up with $1.5 billion for a 10 percent stake or $750 million for a 5 percent piece.

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